we are considering using CBFS for porting our file system onto Windows. However we would like to know if a mingw32 development environment is provided or if it
will be easy enough to develop from Linux with CBFS via mingw.

We have done that in the past with Dokan and we would like to do it again with
CBFS.

Unfortunately we don't have any experience with mingw and I can hardly understand what you are asking about.

If you need user-mode libraries compiled for mingw, this (a) requires a license, as source code of user-mode APIs is provided only to registered users (regular license is enough), and (b) might be not possible due to some VS-specific language constructs.

Maybe we can test such compatibility and even provide a precompiled library if you give us more details about what needs to be done (eg. I don't understand how you can do development involving Windows system components on Linux).

Well, I don't know how they built this stuff. What is system.dll - is it Dokan stock file or it's a custom build for MinGW? It's also not clear, how dokan.lib was compiled. As I understand it, it's not a stock distribution package of Dokan.

Sorry to bother you again but I would need more information to decide
whether to buy a CBFS licence or not. The free version of CBFS comes
with the necessary authentication stuff which I assume downloads the
DLLs etc.

This is not enough for me to guess what is provided. Could you please
tell me more? I suppose you provide DLLs and header files?

Let's start from the end. There's no "free version of CBFS". The evaluation package is offered for downloading and testing. To develop and deploy software which uses CBFS one needs to purchase the license.

The evaluation version includes precompiled .lib files (.a in linux terms) and header files for user-mode API (and of course precompiled setup packages with drivers). When one purchases a license for CBFS, he gets the package which includes above mentioned files AND the source code of all user-mode APIs (driver source code is provided only when the license "with source code" is purchased). The source code of user-mode APIs lets you compile it for needed version of C++ compiler and against required libraries.

Right now we can not guarantee that API's source code can be compiled for mingw. IF mingw can consume .lib files generated for CBFS, then there are no problems - you take existing .lib files and use them. IF recompilation is needed, then we would need to check if it's possible or some changes are needed in the source code. We will check this tomorrow and give you a definite answer.

Our code-base uses C99 features, and due to lack of C99 support in the latest Visual Studio C++, rather than converting all our existing code, we were hoping to use a compliant compiler like MinGW's g++.

We noticed that there are MinGW libraries available and we have started trying to use them, but are having difficulty getting it to work. The sample C++ files do not compile under MinGW, so we do not have a baseline to establish if the problem is on our end or if the MinGW library itself has a problems.

Do you know if anyone has successfully mounted and used CBFS using the MinGW libraries?

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